The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also correspond to embodiments of the claimed subject matter.
In the networking arts the computational burdens set upon remotely deployed network components, (e.g., such as Distribution Point Units (DPUs) and Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexers (DSLAMs) deployed into the field) are increasing, requiring these network components to take on increased roles, while at the same time, the physical size of these units have been trending toward becoming smaller. Although the size of such network components are trending smaller, the physical space available within cabinets which hold such components may nevertheless be constrained. Further still, remote cooling capacity and electrical requirements are sometimes constrained and are universally more costly than equivalent power consumption at a well designed data center.
Unlike specialized network components conventionally deployed into the field, data centers leverage low-cost commoditized hardware to instantiate many virtual machines enabling a significantly lower cost per computation at each such virtual machine, below that of dedicated computers, and far below that of dedicated computational hardware and circuitry of network-located equipment.
As network components become smaller and are deployed further into the supporting network they become increasingly expensive, increasingly complex, and increasingly difficult to manage. Powering such devices may be limited or intermittent, for instance, as commonly happens when reverse powering such devices via power provided from the CPE is interrupted, as some CPE devices may be turned off and thus, cease the flow of power to the supported network component.
The Access Node (also referred to as “AN”) is the first aggregation point in the access network. An Access Node may itself be any of a DSLAM, a DPU, an OLT (“Optical Line Termination” unit), a CMTS (“Cable Modem Termination System”), an Ethernet aggregation switch, etc. As broadband speeds increase, the increased speeds mandate the deployment, support, and utilization of ever advanced signal processing and scheduling capabilities for access nodes, all of which increases computation and storage requirements at the remotely deployed network components, which in turn squeezes the computational capabilities and computing resources available at the access nodes. At the same time data centers and the cloud have ever increasing computational and storage capabilities at decreasing costs using commodity hardware. New methods to virtualize the functions in the access node and leverage virtualized computing resources are now becoming useful.
Centralization of certain remotely deployed network components may help to alleviate some of the constraints and computational burdens placed upon such field components, however, the entities conventionally responsible for manufacturing such components have yet to provide any workable solutions.
The present state of the art may therefore benefit from systems, methods, and apparatuses for implementing the virtualization of access node functions as well as the systems, methods, and apparatuses for implementing Persistent Management Agent (PMA) functions for the control and coordination of DPU and DSLAM components as described herein.